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Update: I started checking the New York Times for mentions of the Benghazi fiasco on Saturday. Saturday-Sunday-Monday -- no mention at all. Zero. Instead, the Times unveiled a headline expose of China's premier and devoted two pages to migrating birds flying into skyscrapers. The Times has taken a page from Stalin. During the Great Famine of the early 1930s, Stalin outlawed the use of the word "famine." If there is bad news, just ignore it. Benghazi is bad news. Let's outlaw "Benghazi." The venerable New York Times just ignores bad news for its endorsed candidate.

Op-ed writer Ross Douthat is a rare truth teller among the NewYork Times’s writers’ stable. Columnist Paul Krugman spouts daily left-wing fact-uninformed economics. Token conservative, David Brooks, pens trivia about the latest book he read. Maureen Dowd jokes about women’s issues. Only Douthat questions the Times’ ueber-liberal party line and tells the truth.

In his Sunday October 14 Mystery of Benghazi, Douthat dissects why “White House officials continued to stress the importance of the ‘hateful’ and ‘disgusting’ video, and its supposed role as a catalyst for what Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, insisted was a spontaneous attack” even as “it became clearer that the Benghazi violence was an al Qaeda operation” --- a narrative “pushed on Sunday morning programs, on late-night talk shows and at news conferences, by everyone from Rice to Hillary Clinton to the president himself.” Per Douthat: “When Obama spoke at the United Nations shortly after the attacks, the video was referenced six times in the text; Al Qaeda was referenced only once.”

Douthat, for the first time on the pages of the venerable Times, clearly lays out the time line of what he terms the administration’s “strange denial” that the Benghazi consulate attack was a planned terrorist action.

Douthat rejects two common explanations for Obama’s “self defeating strategy,” before coming up with his own.

Romney’s charge that “this White House can’t resist the urge to appease our enemies when America comes under attack” does not hold water, reasons Douthat. After all, Obama had no trouble “wrapping himself in the mantle of the war on terror” at the Charlotte convention. Obama could have used this tragedy to be presidential and rally the American people. (Question: Why didn’t he?)

Douthat also doubts the more plausible explanation that “this White House… is loath to acknowledge the possibility that it doesn’t have Al Qaeda completely on the run.” Reasons Douthat: If al Qaeda is still with us, “why wouldn’t Americans want to keep the president who gave the Abbottabad order so he could finish the job?”

In rejecting this protect the “al Qaeda on the run” explanation, Douthat may give the President more credit than due for his analytical capabilities.

Douthat’s own explanation for Obama’s Benghazi blunder: “Obama could not afford the narrative about how a president elected to extract us from a war in one Arab country got Americans killed in another… In this context, it’s easy to see why the administration would hope that the Benghazi attack was just spontaneous mob violence rather than a sign of Al Qaeda’s growing presence in post-intervention Libya as well.”

We may disagree with Douthat’s analysis of the Obama ‘Benghazi Blunder’, but his bottom line is clear. Obama sought to conceal the truth of the Libya tragedy for personal political advantage.

The American people will re-elect a President who tells them the truth, no matter how hard. They will not re-elect a President who distorts the truth for political advantage.

Kudos to columnist Douthat. Let’s hope he can hold on as the Times’ sole truth teller. His latest sin: Admitting that Obama is losing in his Aura of Defeat article of October 24.